Founder Fridays: Building in public with Julia Haber, Home From College and Andrew Silard, Notion

Home from College built a Gen Z career marketplace that pairs students and recent grads with paid, project-based opportunities—then strengthened it into a full platform by treating branding, community, and product feedback as the same system. The core insight traces back to Julia Haber’s first company, an experiential marketing agency that worked with brands on college campuses: students loved the brand but worried they’d graduate “unemployed” without real experience. That gap—between companies trying to reach Gen Z and the next cohort of talent trying to get hired by the brands they actually care about—became the foundation for a new way to think about careers.

The timing mattered. Home from College bought its domain during the pandemic as a product-testing ground, but it became a real business by late 2021 or early 2022, just as remote work and asynchronous opportunities gained legitimacy. As campuses reopened, the platform’s value expanded: many gig types still required physical presence—field marketing, product testing, sample distribution, ambassador programs, and event work—while the company’s campus-by-campus representation let brands tap talent in places they otherwise couldn’t reach, including “middle of nowhere” regions.

Rather than functioning only as a connection point, the business operates as a marketplace-plus-software hybrid. Companies use the platform to recruit, message, contract, run workflows, and build community—so the rails extend beyond matching into ongoing engagement. Early supply-and-demand dynamics were handled manually because the founders weren’t technical: students and brands were matched through Typeform-style workflows while the team validated the thesis. High-profile brand relationships from Haber’s prior network helped attract companies, while a large early student cohort (around 15,000) provided loyalty and enough feedback to shape the first product.

Branding and “student-first” positioning became a growth engine. Home from College frames itself as the place to start a professional journey, with all opportunities paid and additional professional development support. That story also supports discovery: the company’s “college” branding and SEO helped signal relevance, while social content reinforced the identity. Today, the platform includes hundreds of thousands of students across nearly every U.S. campus, serving both early-stage startups and Fortune 500 companies as a pipeline.

Fundraising accelerated the roadmap. The company raised a little under $7 million total, including $5.5 million from Google Ventures, and used that support to build more complex platform functionality and AI-related capabilities. A new product, HFC Bestie, acts like a career guidance counselor and a two-sided sounding board—helping companies with Gen Z marketing and talent acquisition scenarios while supporting students’ career development.

Community remains central to how the platform scales. Home from College maintains multiple layers of student involvement: a Gen Z advisory panel (“deans list”) to test features and track cultural shifts, plus a broader group to surface friction and pain points from potential users. It also built a community dashboard/CRM inside the product so companies can manage applicants and engagement at scale. The company’s advice to founders is direct: build in public, but do it strategically for the right ICP and audience channels—and keep power users close enough that their feedback continuously shapes the product.